Samsung's KitKat update for the Note 3 really did break some third-party cases.

A few days ago, users were reporting that the KitKat update for the Galaxy Note 3 disabled some unofficial accessories. Third-party S-View cases, which trigger a special screen mode when closed, were no longer recognized by the Note 3 after the update. At the time, Samsung claimed that "[a] correlation between the Android version 4.4 and the supposed incompatibility of third-party accessories does not exist" and suggested that users buy official Samsung accessories. Today Samsung sent a new statement to Ars Technica:

We have currently identified a software compatibility issue with the Galaxy Note 3 update to Android 4.4 (KitKat) and select 3rd party accessories. A software update will be available shortly. We are committed to offering a diverse and reliable mobile experience for all customers, providing continued support and solutions for any issues that arise with product updates for both Samsung manufactured and third-party accessories.

Samsung now says that the update did indeed break some third-party accessories, and an update is on the way to fix it. As we noted when we initially reported on this issue, it didn't make sense for the problem to be due to a malicious act by Samsung—the company doesn't gain much by intentionally sabotaging third-party accessories. It's good to see Samsung acknowledging and addressing the problem.

Ron Amadeo
Ron is the Reviews Editor at Ars Technica, where he specializes in Android OS and Google products. He is always on the hunt for a new gadget and loves to rip things apart to see how they work. Emailron.amadeo@arstechnica.com//Twitter@RonAmadeo

We're likely seeing the future of Samsung's stance on 3rd party manufacturers. They want a cut of the accessory market whether you buy their case or not, and they are looking to Apple's cable licensing policies as a positive test case.

Never attribute to stupidity that which is much more likely to be explained by malice.

As we noted when we initially reported on this issue, it didn't make sense for the problem to be due to a malicious act by Samsung—the company doesn't gain much by intentionally sabotaging third-party accessories

Except to create FUD about using 3rd party accessories, driving revenue for their official accessories division.

Samsung now says that the update did indeed break some third-party accessories, and an update is on the way to fix it. As we noted when we initially reported on this issue, it didn't make sense for the problem to be due to a malicious act by Samsung—the company doesn't gain much by intentionally sabotaging third-party accessories.

Samsung now says that the update did indeed break some third-party accessories, and an update is on the way to fix it. As we noted when we initially reported on this issue, it didn't make sense for the problem to be due to a malicious act by Samsung—the company doesn't gain much by intentionally sabotaging third-party accessories.

No, they planned to lock out 3rd party accessories from the beginning or that chip wouldn't be there to begin with.Shades of Lexmark.

You're right, there was probably a plan to lock down accessories at one point, but it sounds like those plans fell through. They would have had to implement that at the launch of the Note 3. They can't do it once people have purchased stuff.

Samsung now says that the update did indeed break some third-party accessories, and an update is on the way to fix it. As we noted when we initially reported on this issue, it didn't make sense for the problem to be due to a malicious act by Samsung—the company doesn't gain much by intentionally sabotaging third-party accessories.

No, they planned to lock out 3rd party accessories from the beginning or that chip wouldn't be there to begin with.Shades of Lexmark.

You're right, there was probably a plan to lock down accessories at one point, but it sounds like those plans fell through. They would have had to implement that at the launch of the Note 3. They can't do it once people have purchased stuff.

For certain types of accessories, I can see the case for locking out problematic third party products.A good example would be the numerous car stereos and clock radios that are iPod/iPhone compatible.

The 'made for i' bit tells the consumer that the device will work correctly.But a case?

I've long thought these companies need some kind of Customer Review Board, who don't work directly for Samsung/Microsoft/etc. so are not influenced by customer policy. Samsung would go to the CRB with new products and/or business strategies and say "as a customer, how would you feel about 'X'?" Then the CRB could respond "You're going to cheese off 3/4 of your existing customer base if you do that." or "This product really blows because you stupidly left out this one simple feature." They basically beta test everything.

A lot of this crap might not happen. Samsung would know that one of the things that makes non-Apple appealing to some people is the low-cost accessories. Microsoft would know that touch-screen interfaces on desktops is a bad idea. etc etc

As we noted when we initially reported on this issue, it didn't make sense for the problem to be due to a malicious act by Samsung—the company doesn't gain much by intentionally sabotaging third-party accessories.

Are we talking about the same Samsung which added region-SIM-locks via firmware-updates just a few weeks ago?

I've long thought these companies need some kind of Customer Review Board, who don't work directly for Samsung/Microsoft/etc. so are not influenced by customer policy. Samsung would go to the CRB with new products and/or business strategies and say "as a customer, how would you feel about 'X'?" Then the CRB could respond "You're going to cheese off 3/4 of your existing customer base if you do that." or "This product really blows because you stupidly left out this one simple feature." They basically beta test everything.

A lot of this crap might not happen. Samsung would know that one of the things that makes non-Apple appealing to some people is the low-cost accessories. Microsoft would know that touch-screen interfaces on desktops is a bad idea. etc etc

Western Electric had an internal 'review board' that noted the light weight being a major problem, but the engineers just ignored the feedback about it sliding off of tables and it went into production anyway.

Needless to say the RBOC's made a lot of service calls retrofitting lead weights into customer phones.

I'm positive a company the size and scope of Samsung has several internal stages of review WRT customer use and suitability, but if they ignore what they are told by the review groups, it doesn't matter.

If a company ignores their internal feedback, I doubt they'd be willing to listen to an external agency.

From Samsung's point of view it's good to know which bit of code can be enabled or disabled to make this sort of functionality only work with 1st-party accessories. It will save them the trouble of figuring out later when we see the S5 and Note 4 magically only work with authorized covers.

Microsoft would know that touch-screen interfaces on desktops is a bad idea. etc etc

To be fair Microsoft had that. They released several versions of Windows 8 in preview form that all had the Start Menu left in (though in later versions it had to be enabled) and it got a lot of praise. Then they released the final RTM preview that didn't have the hook for the Start Menu to be enabled and they got overwhelming scorn and they went ahead with their plans.

You can put all the "Consumer Review Boards" in place that you want but it means nothing if the companies in question aren't willing to listen. Or if they think they know better than you.

Yeah, I dunno, between Android in general and Samsung specifically, I kind of feel as though we're starting to see a "Open and customer-friendly...until we become the dominant player in the market" scenario play out.

Samsung now says that the update did indeed break some third-party accessories, and an update is on the way to fix it. As we noted when we initially reported on this issue, it didn't make sense for the problem to be due to a malicious act by Samsung—the company doesn't gain much by intentionally sabotaging third-party accessories.

No, they planned to lock out 3rd party accessories from the beginning or that chip wouldn't be there to begin with.Shades of Lexmark.

I'm kind of on the fence on this one. I'm not gonna white~knight it either and I do use 3rd party accessories tons but it isn't the first time I've gone through an update on a device and had a 3rd party device fail me; my RCA tv remote, PS3 accessories, Xbox accessories, Samsung S3, ipod 3rd & 5th gen and countless other devices do this to me.

What I usually feel happens is that someone is in a room saying "this is a new update and it will probably lock out 3rd party devices but we can either do hundreds of hours of testing or release the update and wait for reports"..."lets release it and wait for what ppl say, some devices will work anyways with 3rd party and the ones that won't we'll talk about later".

Personally I do like a company acknowledging this issue versus having a device *cough*apple*cough* that will take forever to acknowledge an issue even when its apparent.

We're likely seeing the future of Samsung's stance on 3rd party manufacturers. They want a cut of the accessory market whether you buy their case or not, and they are looking to Apple's cable licensing policies as a positive test case.

Never attribute to stupidity that which is much more likely to be explained by malice.

You got the saying backwards - it's never attribute malice what can be explained by stupidity.

Apple does it to enforce a minimum quality of third party cables - lets not forget the woman who was killed by an electrical fault in her iPhone charger, an extreme case... but there are also millions of people why buy non-authorised equipment only to have it fail (it's happened to me), or the risk of damaging the phone (if you can electrocute someone with a faulty charger you can certainly kill a phone). They're not doing it to make money, i'm sure it's a pitifully small amount of revenue. The real way to make money would be to ban third party cables, which they can do if they wanted to.

I don't think samsung is trying to make money here either. They just made a stupid mistake.

Samsung now says that the update did indeed break some third-party accessories, and an update is on the way to fix it. As we noted when we initially reported on this issue, it didn't make sense for the problem to be due to a malicious act by Samsung—the company doesn't gain much by intentionally sabotaging third-party accessories.

No, they planned to lock out 3rd party accessories from the beginning or that chip wouldn't be there to begin with.Shades of Lexmark.

I'm kind of on the fence on this one. I'm not gonna white~knight it either and I do use 3rd party accessories tons but it isn't the first time I've gone through an update on a device and had a 3rd party device fail me; my RCA tv remote, PS3 accessories, Xbox accessories, Samsung S3, ipod 3rd & 5th gen and countless other devices do this to me.

What I usually feel happens is that someone is in a room saying "this is a new update and it will probably lock out 3rd party devices but we can either do hundreds of hours of testing or release the update and wait for reports"..."lets release it and wait for what ppl say, some devices will work anyways with 3rd party and the ones that won't we'll talk about later".

Personally I do like a company acknowledging this issue versus having a device *cough*apple*cough* that will take forever to acknowledge an issue even when its apparent.

Based on an examination of the hacks that re-enabled 3rd party accessories( see the readme accompanying one such hack, it seems vanishingly unlikely that Samsung was merely making a mistake because testing is hard. Their system has multiple case categories built in, and as of the kitkat update, all non-blessed cases were relegated to the 'no case' category, which was fixable by stubbing that out and dropping in the value for a Samsung case.

I would hardly say that a manufacturer is responsible for 3rd party accessories (aside from any implicit responsibility incurred by claiming compliance with 802.11N or BT 4.0 OBEX, or USB 2.0, or other standards that are all about communication/interaction, where they could be forgiven only if the 3rd party accessory is itself defective at standards compliance); but deliberate lockout is a dick move.

The only way I can see this as being an innocent mistake is if the intent had always been to have the lockout enabled from day one. Perhaps the testing versions of the OS had the lockout disabled while they worked on other aspects of the code. Then, when it came time to ship, the version that got released to manufacturing was one of the development versions without the lock enabled, whereas future updates such as KitKat were based upon what was supposed to have been the released code with the lockout enabled.

Even giving them this benefit of the doubt however, there's still the issue that third party accessory makers appeared to be ignorant of any such licensed accessory program. Which means that if it was Samsung's intent all along to lockout third party accessories, then they never bothered telling the accessory makers of their plans.

So even this scenario still doesn't really paint Samsung in a better light. I'm glad they're fixing it, but FFS, they should come clean about their intents. I can't vouch for anyone else, but I would respect them more if they flat out said, "We intended to do evil, but kinda failed," instead of, "Nope, no evil to be found here. Honest mistake. Move along. Move along."

I have the first Galaxy Note but after these shenanigans that include the SIM locking BS, I have no intention of buying the newer version. The SIM locking won't affect me personally because I never go anywhere but here in the USA the only way to register your dissatisfaction with a company's business decisions is by not purchasing their product. I didn't get a cell phone until around 1.5 years ago because I hated the business practices of these wireless providers. When I did I purchased an unlocked phone and SIM card. Unfortunately protests don't work well when you're the only protestor.

I have the first Galaxy Note but after these shenanigans that include the SIM locking BS, I have no intention of buying the newer version. The SIM locking won't affect me personally because I never go anywhere but here in the USA the only way to register your dissatisfaction with a company's business decisions is by not purchasing their product. I didn't get a cell phone until around 1.5 years ago because I hated the business practices of these wireless providers. When I did I purchased an unlocked phone and SIM card. Unfortunately protests don't work well when you're the only protestor.

I have a Galaxy S3 that's due to be replaced in eight months, and I'm very hesitant to get another Samsung after some of Samsung's recent antics. If Motorola has a Moto X 2 out by then, or if my carrier starts carring higher-end Sony or HTC devices, this sort of mistreatment of customers would make it hard to stay with Samsung.

I have the first Galaxy Note but after these shenanigans that include the SIM locking BS, I have no intention of buying the newer version. The SIM locking won't affect me personally because I never go anywhere but here in the USA the only way to register your dissatisfaction with a company's business decisions is by not purchasing their product. I didn't get a cell phone until around 1.5 years ago because I hated the business practices of these wireless providers. When I did I purchased an unlocked phone and SIM card. Unfortunately protests don't work well when you're the only protestor.

buy a unlocked from from the start then ? (think thats what your talking about) if its a CDMA phone well you can bash as much as you want they will not care